


Catching the Lightning

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [28]
Category: DCU, The Flash (Comics)
Genre: Drama, Earth-3, Gen, Humor, Hypnosis, Legacy Character, Luthor gets a little high-handed, Mirror Universe, Secret Identity, Sibling Relationship, Team Dynamics, Zamboni, and being a lightning rod is stressful work, leading a superhero team is always like herding cats len, slightly mad science, the mortality rate of Flash villains is frankly alarming tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-22 22:46:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14318703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: There’s a talking gorilla trying to punch the Dash. Len doesn’t even know when his life decided nothing normal would ever happen to him again, but he maintains it is not his fault. He just pulled on a parka and tried to stop a mutant menace with a freeze-ray, like any decent citizen who happened to have built a freeze-ray would have done.Last time he said that, Digger actually strained a muscle laughing at him.





	Catching the Lightning

**Author's Note:**

> Splitting the difference between 'I want to do the reversed Rogues' and 'I am not attached enough to the Rogues to write them the full series they deserve' by hitting a random assortment of highlights over the years. ^^
> 
> Few Flash villains have very menacing monikers, so they mostly kept their names. For batfans here's a _partial_ cast list of the Rogues appearing:
> 
>  **James Jesse** , birth name Giovanni Giuseppe, the Trickster. In canon, a fairly low-key supervillain from a family of acrobats who comes up with some really brilliant prank-themed gadgets.
> 
>  **Hartley Rathaway** , The Piper. Specialty mind-control flute-playing. A very low-key supervillain who’s actually spent more of his career reformed than not. Friend of Wally West’s; youngest Classic Rogue. From a wealthy family, very concerned with social justice. Gay. Silly hat. What's not to love.
> 
>  **Digger Harkness** , Captain Boomerang. He’s Australian and has improbable boomerang skill and supply, including the unofficial power of Infinite Boomerang Hat. An asshole.
> 
>  **Mark Meardon** , the Weather Wizard. Controls weather, has had several plotlines dedicated to his villainous attempts to _figure out how he does this,_ which is hilarious. I renamed him Weather Man because I _had to_.
> 
>  **Evan McCullock** , the second Mirror Master. Scottish foundling, moved to Glasgow in his teens, it's not clearly established where exactly from. Hitman. Has angst.
> 
>  **Lisa Snart** , the Golden Glider. Pro skater, engaged to her coach, a spinning supervillain.
> 
> And her brother, our POV guy, **Leonard Snart** aka Captain Cold. He’s been on TV recently? But apparently strangely good-looking and less of a grouch.

The Dash zips across the field of ice Len’s laid down between him and the redheaded reporter.

He’s more and more getting the knack of finding his footing in low-friction conditions, like someone learning to drive all over again after moving north and encountering winter weather. It slows him down a little having to pick his steps, but these day he’s mostly stopped losing traction and skidding all over creation, unless Len manages to hit him with surprise ice.

Luckily, Len’s team together still know a hell of a lot more about physics than a certain lazy chemistry genius who always tries to take the shortcut to everything in life.

Almost as soon as the defensive sheet of ice went down, Mick fired up the new wide setting on _his_ gun. He didn’t make a big production of it, from the outside it probably looks like he didn’t even do anything, just took off the safety or something. Electromagnetism is helpfully invisible.

A second and a half after beginning his dash toward the frazzled redhead he’s been harrassing, the Dash hits the ice Mick targeted. The ice with a thin layer of water distributed over the top. The ice that is therefore about twenty times slicker and harder to control trajectory against.

Dash’s leading foot skids sharply out to one side, almost too fast for the naked eye to even infer what had just occurred if you hadn’t been waiting for it.

His right knee hits the ground and Len’s ice ray has already fired to encase him in ice from that still point on up, even as Dash lets out a strangled sound that suggests he pulled a groin muscle going down.

Telling the moment Dash has really passed out from lack of oxygen inside his icy prison and then getting him out before he dies, _without_ getting him out too soon and letting him race away was a long, tricky learning process, but Len is an absolute expert now, and when Mick melts him free the smiling serial killer lies limp and shallowly breathing on the rotting ice more than long enough to get him into the power-dampening cuffs and call the police in to take him away.

Mick puts up one asbestos-shielded hand for a high five, and Len, feeling tolerant in victory, claps back.

* * *

Len’s polishing the ice for tomorrow, when his sister comes in. Nothing he’s invented gets a better surface for skates than the good old Zamboni-brand ice resurfacer that came with the place, though pretty much all of it is faster, and honestly he kind of likes the time chugging around on the ice in the silence of an empty rink, all the noisy customers gone home.

He shuts the engine off when he sees her, though, and gives her a long narrow look across the glass-smooth ice.

“ _Silver Skater,_ Lise?” he complains. “What, you couldn’t think of anything less subtle? Shining Star, maybe?” She winces, and he’s sorry—she hasn’t used her stage name since she stopped competing, since Roscoe died. And it’s not that the _name_ is unsubtle, really, or even tacky—considering this is the woman who seriously suggested that he go by the alias ‘The Great Zamboni’ when he was starting out, the name is actually surprisingly tasteful.

It’s going out using her publicly documented skating tricks that’s blatant, and the shimmery sequined costume that’s an eyesore.

“It’s alliterative,” she bites out. “Like yours.”

“What, you want to be a duo? No. No, no, and also no.”

“Len—”

“This is _dangerous._ I know you want revenge for Roscoe. I understand that.”

Lisa is standing just outside the entrance onto the rink proper in a warm blue-wool coat Len bought her five years ago, with her skate case lying by her feet and no gloves. She has her yellow hair braided back the complicated way she did occasionally for competition, the same style she wore to fight the Dash. She lays a hand on the half-wall as if to hold herself back, and doesn’t step out onto the ice.

“Do you?” she asks. “I’m not sure you do.”

“He’s not the first friend I’ve lost to this job,” Len says, a little roughly, because sure, he’s never been in love, let alone had a fiancé murdered, but romance is not the only thing in the world that matters. “It takes even the best-prepared. This isn’t something to just rush into,” he says, as if he wasn’t just some guy in a parka with a freeze-ray ten years ago, as if he isn’t still some guy in a parka with a freeze ray _now_.

“Pretty sure I’m in better shape than you,” Lisa snips, and yes, of course she is, she’s been in better shape than him since she was seven and first went out on the ice. But he uses _guns_ , as in ranged attacks, and figure skating is not exactly a combat discipline.

Even if the way she left the Dash’s costume sliced and slashed apart over lines of blood from the freshly sharpened edges of her skates was sort of impressive.

“That’s not the point. The point is that this is insanely stupid and we can’t _both_ do it.” Len takes a breath, and deploys his nuclear option. “Lise,” he says, letting his fear show. “You can’t let that maniac kill you, too.”

The nuclear option is brushed aside like dandelion fluff. His sister’s lips tighten. “If I have to live with the risk of losing you, you’ll just have to live with the chance of losing me.”

Len’s gut clenches, and he’s vaulted out of his seat and onto the ice before he thinks. But then he stands where he is, because going storming up to her would smack of threat and he isn’t their dad, and besides storming across newly-polished ice in sneakers is likely to go horribly wrong. “You think this is about losing you? You think I’m that selfish?” And he is, really. He’d sacrifice things he really definitely shouldn’t to protect her, and if she keeps bursting onto the field like this he is going to get someone killed trying.

“What else am I supposed to think? I’m not a child for you to protect anymore, Len.”

“No,” he admits. “You’re an adult. You have a career and a future. And that’s why you should stay out of this. You have medals to win and a life to live. You were always the one that was _going places_ , Lise. Don’t let that jackoff take that from you.”

“And I’m telling you I don’t care about any of that anymore. I _can’t!_ ” Lisa’s perfectly made-up face cracks where he can see for the first time since the funeral, and to hell with The Top for getting himself wrapped up in her professional _and_ personal lives before getting himself messily dead. It means his absence is everywhere. She doesn’t have anywhere to retreat from the pain. “You’re _all I’ve got left!_ And you go out there, facing that maniac day after day—I get that I can’t ask you to stop, but don’t you dare tell me I can’t help.”

She swallows, convulsive, and blinks watery eyes at him. “You don’t really mean that, do you Len? Because of course it matters if you die.”

“Not like you matter,” Len insists.

“ _Yes_ like I matter! Exactly as much! More, if anything—what have I got? _Fans?_ Skating generations are measured in, in five-year increments, I was practically up for retirement anyway! You have a _team_ , you _keep people safe—_ you own a business! You matter more just to the _kids who come here to skate after school_ than I ever have to anybody but you and _Roscoe!_ ” Her hands are shaking, balled up in fists at her sides. “And he’s _dead._ ”

Len scrambles across the ice, manages not to fall down in spite of his completely unsuitable shoes, scuffle-skids the last six feet to her side and catches himself on the half-wall. “Lise,” he says. He’s thirty-five years old and feels sixty sometimes. “Lise, that’s not, you’ve got it all wrong kiddo.”

She looks up at him the way she did when she was six and he was nineteen and their Dad was dead, and he had to figure out how to keep them both fed so the state didn’t take her away forever. He hadn’t been sure back then he wouldn’t do better to let her go, but she’d loved Dad as much as she’d feared him, as much as Len had loathed him, and she’d been grieving then, too, and she’d grabbed two tiny fistfuls of his jacket and begged him not to leave her alone.

Len left the jacket draped over her shoulders that first evening, her head vanished entirely inside the hood, while he had to go off and sign papers and leave her with the neighbor lady.

They’d never have made it if his boss who used to own this pace hadn’t been okay with Len bringing her in with him, evenings. She used to do her first grade homework up on the bleacher seats overlooking the rink, stealing envious glances up over the edge of her workbook at the other kids sailing and slipping over the ice. Len got her a pair of used skates for Christmas that year and Mrs. Hauser let her skate free outside peak hours.

She was twelve and pulling in her first endorsement revenue when Len first went out and shot an ice gun at a supervillain. It only took her six months to figure him out, even with how much time she spent on the road in competition season. He knows she worried, even before what happened to Roscoe.

She reaches out and grabs a handful of his sweatshirt. “Len,” she says. “Stop trying to leave me behind.”

He's always thought she was the one doing that.

He drags himself in over the last foot of ice between them by the grip she's got on him, and engulfs her in a hug as best her can now that he's barely three inches taller. "Kiddo," he says, even though she's twenty-two and a grown woman, "that's the last thing I ever wanted to do."

* * *

The new speedster is wearing the same skintight laminate that Dash favors, but his is red only in snatches, highlights on orange that are in turn overlaid on yellow. He has the lightning bolt emblem on his chest, in shiny gold, and the other three colors radiate out from it in a sort of jagged starburst.

It’s pretty tacky, even as villain outfits go.

The cleats are worrying. He's going in prepared to handle icy surfaces, and if it means chewing up every surface he runs across, he doesn't care.

He can’t be more than seventeen, Len thinks. Still only partway through his growth spurt, with that awkward out-of-proportion look. Flaming orange hair spills out the top of his costume, like he copied Dash’s hood and then cut the top off. It’s like he doesn’t even care if they figure out who he is.

He probably doesn’t. Even without superpowers, a lot of punks that age think they’re indestructible.

“I could blow your head up,” he says to the Weather Man.

“Wh,” Mark manages. He tries to push himself up, onto his knees or at least high enough to look his enemy in the face, but his arm shakes and buckles, and he’s on the ground again. The wind stirs, but he doesn’t have the strength or focus right now to whip up even a decent gale, let alone a tornado or a lightning bolt.

“Or I can set you on fire. I love that. Or I can rip out your heart, I’ve been wanting to try that one. Or I can go with Dash’s old standby and just smash you really hard into that wall over there.

"Basically I have all the options, because the laws of momentum state that force is equal to mass times acceleration, and _kinetic energy_ is equal to one-half mass times velocity _squared._ So, you know.” He kicks Mark in the shoulder, flipping him onto his back. Something cracks. Hopefully just an already-broken panel of armor. “Energy is just another word for power.”

This had better work.

“Hey,” says the dweeby psychopath dressed like a fireball, a crooked grin on his face that belongs on someone who just won his high school science fair, “you can just surrender right now, and I promise to make it fast.”

“Who _are_ you?” Len asks, because Mark can’t.

The kid looks up at him, the crooked grin spreading a little until it actually looks as unhinged as it is. “Call me Blaze,” he says. And he’s awful, he’s a brand-new monster on top of the one they already had, but it’s so blatantly obvious that he practiced this moment in his bathroom mirror dozens of times, he’s so _young_ it makes Len despair almost more than it pisses him off.

And then Digger’s heaviest boomerang clobbers Blaze on the back of the head, and he goes down like—well, not so much a ton of bricks as a stunned emu. He doesn’t quite collapse on Weather Man, but they’re sort of overlapping.

“Hhah,” Mark says, blurrily victorious.

Len goes to drag him out of the way, so he can get a clear shot to ice Blaze down for safekeeping.

Well, on the upside it looks like he doesn’t have to worry about job security. In his high-risk volunteer position.

On second thought, that’s a terrible bright side.

* * *

Sometimes, Len thinks James doesn’t actually care about saving the day.

Sure, he saves a ridiculous number of lives just by building things like those velocity-cancelers, for when Dash throws somebody at superspeed and they’re able to react in time.

And he’s been selling those gizmos pretty cheap to the Central/Keystone police forces, and interested civilians, and now apparently there are fire departments across the country interested in stocking them for when their guys need to jump out windows.

(Len can attest that the things work for that purpose, having jumped out of at least a dozen burning buildings relying on nothing but Trickster’s tricks and completely inadequate melting ice ramps for survival.)

But saving people doesn’t really come across as his _reason_.

And he’s not doing it for the money, either, or he’d be looking into opening an actual factory for the velocity-dampener gadgets _alone_ , instead of considering leasing the patent rights so somebody else can make that bundle.

No, Len’s pretty sure James is in this fight because it’s his idea of _fun_. Because Dash is a challenge, and an excuse to do really stupid shit in public and have people approve of him for it. Can’t take the circus out of the boy, after all.

Not that that isn’t a lot of why they’re _all_ involved, even the angry, creepy Rathaway kid. You’ve gotta be kind of a thrillseeker to make it in this business. But Len isn’t sure James even thinks about victims or collateral damage, except as points scored by Dash. That attitude gives him a systematic, straightforward and out-of-the-box approach to _preventing_ that kind of thing—like the velocity-capture mines—but if sometime James saw a chance to take the speedster down flat, at the expense of a bunch of bystanders…Len can’t be sure he wouldn’t take it. So that worries him.

It pisses him off he has to worry about it, in a personal, I-should-do-something kind of way instead of the easy, well-that-would-suck kind, but he’s the leader. He’s a _Captain._

Admittedly that is a fake title he gave himself and he isn’t even the only one, but that doesn’t matter. He’s the leader. The others listen to him…a good forty to sixty percent of the time. Which means he’s _responsible_.

He should probably be more ashamed of his relief that they’ve had three back-to-back crises in the last week and he hasn’t had anything approaching a good opportunity to try to open that conversation.

There’s a talking gorilla trying to punch the Dash. Len doesn’t even know when his life decided nothing normal would ever happen to him again, but he maintains it is not his fault. _He_ just pulled on a parka and tried to stop a mutant menace with a freeze-ray, like any decent citizen who happened to have built a freeze-ray would have done.

Last time he said that, Digger actually strained a muscle laughing at him. Len still owes him a kicking for that.

Mick backs him up, but Mick did almost the exact same thing with an insanely overclocked heat gun so consensus is Len and Mick aren’t allowed to critique each other’s thought processes.

* * *

A week later Captain Cold drags himself into the Rogue headquarters/secret base/clubhouse (his teammates are all mentally about nine years old, he’s gotten used to it) and collapses into the most comfortable armchair before noticing there’s already somebody in the room. Somebody sitting in one of the other chairs with ‘whoops, didn’t expect anybody to come in’ body language.

Somebody in a suit he _recognizes._

“Sam?!” He didn’t even know he had the energy to get on his feet half that fast, but here he is.

Nobody’s seen Sam Scudder since the day he dove into the mysterious mirror-dimension he’d discovered but not risked entering, until it was their only shot at getting to the nuclear bunker before Dash, and stopping him from using his stolen launch codes.

Except as it turned out someone had _come from the fecking future_ to save the day and Sam had never needed to take that risk. Len had fucking _encouraged_ him, told him they were all counting on him. That was three years ago. He never came back. But here’s his awful orange jumpsuit and ugly-as-sin green helmet-thing, and even something like his terrible lumpish posture, taking up a chair in the Rogue base like he was never gone.

“Ach, sorry,” says the man, in a voice that definitely isn’t Sam's. He’s Scottish. What the hell is a _Scottish Mirror-Man impersonator_ doing in their secret base? “Didna mean t’ mislead ye. T’Insider pointed me here,” he adds, like that somehow makes it okay. Like The Insider had the right. Just because you accept funding from a guy doesn’t mean he fucking _owns_ you.

Len grits his teeth, all the energy that came from his approximately two seconds of thinking one of his dead friends was back _more_ than gone. He stabs a finger at the door. “And I’m pointing you the way _out,_ ” he snarls. “No. I have had a fucking _terrible_ day. Month. Tell Luthor if he wants to sponsor new members for our little club he can call us on the phone like a civilized person or something. If you are not out of here in the next fifteen seconds I am turning you into an ice sculpture and leaving you in a dog kennel to thaw.”

“Have t’say I doubt as I’d be terrible fashed at the dogs, havin’ been frozen clean t’death y’ken,” says the fake Mirror-Man, still for some reason sitting in their plaid chair.

Len narrows his eyes. There is no way he’s being that incomprehensible by accident. “Stop.” He considers getting wordier, but just finishes with, “Go.” Points at the door to make it clear how he means it.

Nobody died this week, but there were injuries. Leonard isn’t up to this. He wasn’t trained for this. He wasn’t trained for anything. He’s not a real Captain. They can’t protect two cities from a man that moves as fast as thought. They _still_ don’t know what was up with the gorilla.

“I think I ken how t’get Scudder out t’mirrors.”

Len collapses back into his chair. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Okay. Luthor thought it was legit, that’s— “ _Talk._ ”

* * *

“It’s a gorilla,” says Trickster blankly.

Len reaches out without looking and smacks him on the back of the head. James was out of town the week the gorilla turned up before, but they _told_ him about it. Mick _would not shut up_ about it.

The gorilla makes a weird grumbling noise in its throat, but its expression suggests it might be amused. Who can tell with gorillas? “Indeed,” it agrees, adjusting its grip on its gun in a very professional way.

“The talking gorilla has a gun,” Trickster points out.

“Shut up, James,” Captain Cold and Captain Boomerang say in sync.

“What’s your business in town?” Weather Man asks, managing not to sound completely rude.

“I am charged with bringing the superhuman known as Dash back to Gorilla City to face prosecution.”

“You’re a cop,” says Len.

With that description he could be a frigging _bail bondsman_ or something, but no, the way he said it, he’s a cop.

“A gorilla cop,” says Trickster unnecessarily.

“From Gorilla City,” chimes in Digger, too sincere to be anything but insincere, and Len’s palms itch with the urge to smack them both, but it wouldn’t help.

“The name is Grodd,” says the gorilla cop, either missing or ignoring that they’re making fun of its existence. It—okay he, Len’s pretty sure it’s a guy and using ‘it’ now that they’ve been introduced is starting to feel bad—raises his gun and fires some kind of laser beam down the street, blowing a huge hole in the tarmac and knocking Dash off his feet before any of the rest of them had realized he was coming. “I propose we work together.”

“…I can get behind that plan, mate,” says Captain Boomerang. This time the sincerity is less of a joke.

* * *

“I’m sick of this!” Hartley shouts.

The tears running down his face have dried, and he's stalking down a residential street in the middle of the night, yelling, and Len can't blame him for any of it. It's just like Lisa was ten years ago, only Hartley wasn't allowed to be engaged to the person Dash took from him, and Lisa has never believed in a _way the world is supposed to be_ the way The Piper has somehow gone on doing all these years.

"Nobody helps each other in this world," Hartley complains, possibly to Captain Cold who continues to follow him because he clearly needs supervision right now. "That's the problem. Nobody ever helps _us._ That's what I'm sick of."

His hands clench around his flute. Len would worry about the thing but it's really damn tough, and also the Rathaway family fortune has not noticed the cost of several dozen flutes being purchased annually for years. The power's not in the flute, it's in Hartley. It always was.

"People help," Len says, doing his best at soothing. He's ignored.

“Running as fast as we can just to stay in one place. This isn't what I signed up for. I wanted to _change_ things. Bring about _justice_. I wanted to make them _sorry_." He's getting more and more upset, but instead of walking faster he's going slower, like each step is an entire dramatic production in its own right. "And instead all we do is chase about after Dash and Blaze, putting out fires."

"Well..." says Len. _It's okay_ is the right kind of thing to say at a time like this, but it doesn't seem like it would fit into the ongoing monologue very well.

Hartley's voice goes flat. "And now Paul is dead. And I…I’m going to _make them pay._ ”

And he puts his pipes to his mouth, and he _plays._

Len’s never heard anything like it. He’s known this kid since he really _was_ a kid, looking waif-small in his big smock and pointed hat, like a furious little elf, and he’s had his neck saved by that piping enough times before, and he has _never_ heard this. This wild, unearthly skirling.

It’s barely even sound anymore. It’s music that fires itself straight into your brainstem, it’s pure liquid anger, it’s _making him think in metaphors._

It’s not aimed at him, at least.

It’s aimed at _everybody else_.

People are lurching out of their houses, expressions fixed and blank. It’s _Night of the Living Dead_ except they’re all healthy and breathing, except they won’t be for long if Captain Cold’s guess is right. Because they mass around the Piper briefly, and then break off in clumps. Each group goes a slightly different way from the last one, and their glazed zombie eyes are searching restlessly. What Hartley’s forcing on these people is a hunting pattern.

And there’s only one thing Piper has a reason to want to hunt.

“Stop,” Len says, as he realizes what’s happening. He paces along at Piper’s side, like a detached shadow, while the hypnotized crowd shuffles along behind, steadily swelling with new followers that eventually break away again, off into the city to hunt down the Dash and his sidekick. “Hartley, you gotta stop this, kid. I don’t care if it’s in everybody’s best interests to take those freaks down, you can’t just throw people onto the front lines like this.”

He’s learned to be flexible about people putting themselves there even when he thinks they really shouldn’t—Hartley’s been a real asset to the team for ages, and since Luthor sent Lisa those space-metal skate blades she’s been a flying, laser-kicking dynamo who has trouble slowing down to wait for the rest of them.

But _making_ people walk into danger is just. How is that any better than just straight-up attacking them?

Hartley takes his lips away from the mouthpiece of his flute for just a moment. “Everything would turn out okay if everyone would just _work together_ ,” he breathes. And then he’s playing again, twice as fast and twice as wild.

The needles in Len’s spine are firing, and he finds his hand falling to his freeze-ray even though he’s been consciously avoiding even _looking_ like he was going to do that because the last thing this situation needed was further escalation. The music is escalating more than enough for anybody, he thinks.

And then he doesn’t think much of anything for a while.

-

         -

                -

                         -

                                   -

Len wakes up to find the plaza outside of City Hall littered with broken and unconscious bodies. Beside the decorative fountain, Hartley Rathaway is splayed out senseless like all the rest, his flute ten feet from his outflung hand.

 _Unlike_ the rest, Hartley has a gorilla wearing a bandolier standing over him, fist still outstretched from the blow that must have laid The Piper out, and stopped the music.

Len’s stomach lurches grossly as he sits up. Hypnosis hangover? Is that a thing? “Grodd,” he says, sounding only about 80% demented. The pieces won’t quite come together. “Did it…not work ‘cuz you aren’t human?”

It’s a stretch; Piper started out his career controlling _mostly_ animals, and people only ever for a second or two at a time, to stop them from pulling a trigger or stepping over an edge. But this music was different, so….

“It didn’t _work_ because I’m _psychic_ ,” Grodd snorts. Oh. Of course. Why would the gorilla cop not be psychic. “I have mental defenses. The Dash did a lot of damage before your young friend managed to influence him, so—”

Len struggles to his feet. “Hartley got to _Dash?_ ”

It’s been a while since he’s had much direct success with that; if the Dash knows it’s coming he can run out of range, or if he's been pinned down enough by the others that that’s not an option, he'll vibrate at a frequency that means he can’t perceive sound normally. The same way for the longest time, even in power-dampening cuffs, he'd buzz to keep his unmasked face from being seen or photographed while he was in custody.

So the main use Hartley’s been on the villain-hypnosis front for years has been as a deterrent, one that occasionally allows them to plan out loud right in front of Dash without being overheard.

“Once enough people were holding onto him to slow him down,” says Grodd. Around them, people are starting to stir, but the trail of bodies that must be the result of the mass compelled determination to lay hands on the Dash and keep him still—well, so are _some_ of them. Some probably won’t ever again. Damn it, kid.

“Gluh. Okay. Ambulances. To call. Where’s Dash?”

“In my custody,” says Grodd, in an implacable way that Len assumes means he’s _not_ going to let anybody else take the dude in this time.

He’s welcome to him. They got the mask off and finally outed him to the cops last time Grodd was in town, so his cozy life in the police department is over; Len has no attachment to having the guy locked up in Missouri instead of Africa.

The opposite, actually. Any interested continent can have him. Digger has been welcome to take Dash home to Australia whenever he feels like it _this whole time._

Not that an ocean is all that much of a barrier to Bartholomew Allen, but still. It’s the thought that counts.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic runs from 1990 to 2003, btw. ^^ I've filed it in the series where the last bit fits in.
> 
> XD I only realized after it was complete that I _still_ haven't let Barry speak, at all. I don't know what I'm afraid he'll say, but apparently my subconscious _does not want_ to hear from Dash.


End file.
